Friday 3 February 2017 at 10:15

Arrays are beautiful in PHP. One can map them, reduce them, filter them, foreach them, and use them in generators. Strings, on the other hand, are mere shadows to the Array. One can, uh, input and output Strings, and, when brave, manipulate them. What makes Arrays so awesome and Strings so dull? Iterators.

In this talk, we’ll look at the modest origins of the String and the basics of the Iterator. Then, we’ll look at how we can make the String as awesome as the Array through the use of iterator interfaces.

By the end of this talk, you will know the origins of the PHP String and you will be able to extend your knowledge of iterating through a String to be able to iterate through customized objects.

Iterating strings is often a necessary but until now a not very exciting task for me. This talk makes we want to go and redo all the string handling code I've written in the past. I've heard reference to spl iterators but have never actually seen anyone at a conference go into detail on using them. Creating an iterable null object is great and something I never would have thought of looking at the docs. I will definitely study the haystack repo to better understand the inner and outer iterable patterns.